The 512 page “visual documentary” contains more than 700 photographs and is printed on fine art paper. The tome is also bound with leather and silk-wrapped.

Copies of the limited edition book, titled Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page, are personally signed by the rock legend. Only 2,500 copies are set to be published around the world.

Instead of a written autobiography, the memoir is only made up of mostly unseen and personal photographs, which took the 66-year-old musician a year to select.

But fans have reacted with anger after the publishers disclosed the memoir’s eye-watering retail price.

"This price is beyond the price that we mere mortals, who helped make him and supported him when he was less well off, can possibly pay for," one fan wrote online.

Another added: "For that price he'd better deliver it to my house and read it to me."

A third said: "Thanks a lot for pricing your picture book out of the hands of 98% of your fans, Jimmy – we appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Hilary Rosen, a former president of the Recording Industry Association of America, described the book as an exhaustive "visual documentary" detailing Page's four-decade career with Led Zeppelin.

The notoriously secret musician defended the book in a statement posted on the publisher’s website.

“I’ve really got a lot of time for the way Genesis (the publishers) produce their books, they’re really quality items,” he said.

“As someone who’s always been interested in having a library themselves, I appreciate fine bookbinding and their whole ethic of what they do and what they’re trying to do with a whole catalogue of books."

He added to The New York Times: "I've been approached to do an autobiography, but I thought that was the least attractive way of doing a book.

"So I thought it would be quite interesting to do a photographic autobiography ... a career in pictures.”

He said he only chose photographs that showed him on stage.

"It's purely about the music and nothing else," he told the newspaper. He said it will be the closest fans will get to a memoir.

Catherine Roylance, co-owner of Genesis Publishers, described the book as a “handcrafted work of art”.